Beside assurance and acceptance, a growing Christian has four basic needs. He needs protection, fellowship, food, and training.

He needs protection. Paul continued to undergo the pains of childbirth for his converts till Christ was formed in them (see Gal. 4:19). He prayed for the Corinthians that they would not do anything wrong (see 2 Cor. 13:7).

New babies need protection. In a hospital nursery the nurses sterilize everything; they wear masks to protect the new little lives from germs. New life is tender and fragile, and must be protected from disease. So it is with new babes in Christ. They need protection from false cults and a variety of attacks by the enemy. People spreading the disease of false religion will show up at their door. The convert’s old cronies will try to entice him back into the old paths. A former girlfriend will want to renew the relationship. Satan, as a roaring lion, will try to destroy him. So he must be protected and immunized with the Word of God.

He needs fellowship. He has been bom into a family and he needs the fellowship of his brothers and sisters in Christ. When my wife and I came to Christ, a woman in the church we attended took special pains to make sure we met Christian couples our age. She took time to look up passages in the Bible for us in answer to the many questions we had. She would introduce us to others in the congregation who would invite us to their homes for fellowship during the week. A farmer, a banker, a barber—they extended their lives to us and made us feel at home and welcome in the Sunday school and church.

I would still go out with some of my old ex-Marine buddies occasionally, but these people from church stuck with Virginia and me like a peel on an orange. I know our language and lifestyle must have caused them some concern and no doubt even offended some of them, but they overlooked it. Babies occasionally make messes, do foolish things, and may be somewhat of a bother. So are babies in the spiritual realm. Our new friends from church didn’t let it bother them, and after some months I noticed something. I felt more at home with these new friends than I did with the people I had known most of my life. The Spirit of God, who had made us part of the body of Christ, was beginning to make us feel part of the body.

When I was in high school, I worked in a bakery. Frequently we would make batches of frosting for cakes and chocolate donuts. I would take great lumps of broken chocolate, put them in a pan, and warm them over a low fire. The chocolate lumps would begin to melt, stick together, and finally blend into one pan full of melted chocolate.

That’s what Christian fellowship is all about. Not a group of people in one building like marbles in a bag, but like lumps of chocolate that have blended together and become part of one another. This only happens through the ministry of the Holy Spirit as He slowly warms our hearts together in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (see Gal. 5:22-23).

He needs food. Natural babies need to be fed regularly. Spiritual babies need the same regularity in their feeding. And their spiritual food is the Word of God. “Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good” (1 Peter 2:2-3).

You give the new believer food in two ways. One is to teach him the Word. When my wife and I would visit in the homes of our new Christian friends, the conversation would invariably turn to spiritual things. We would ask questions, and they would get out their Bibles and share the answers with us. I soon became convinced that every answer to every question was in that Book. When they didn’t have an answer to a question I asked, they would go to other leaders in the church who would help them with it and they in turn would share that answer with us. I was also learning the Scriptures in Sunday school and church.

But it wasn’t till I met Waldron Scott that I learned the second way of feeding on the Word. My friends fed me from the Bible, but Scotty taught me to feed myself. He took Virginia and me through some basic question and answer Bible studies where we had to dig out the answers ourselves. He taught us to memorize Scripture for ourselves. He showed us how we could feed ourselves from the Bible.

So, in order to help a new Christian grow, you must teach him the Word, share it with him, but also teach him how to dig in for himself. Do your best to get him off the spiritual milk bottle. Do your best to help him pass the stage where you have to spoon feed him his spiritual pablum. Teach him to feed himself.

Unless you teach him that vital habit, he will be dependent on others for the rest of his life. God wants him to grow and develop into a strong disciple of Jesus Christ who can, in turn, meet the needs of others and eventually teach them to repeat the process.

He needs training. Again Paul left us an example, “For you know that we dealt with each of you as a father deals with his own children” (1 Thess. 2:11). His example of a father is interesting.

A father does not teach his child everything. He does not teach him world history or geometry, but he sees to it that his child goes to school. He may turn him over to a swimming instructor to teach him how to swim; he may take him to a soccer coach to teach him to play that sport. Someone else may teach him the art of photography or the techniques of skiing, but the father is responsible for the overall development of the child.

In your training of the new believer, you should focus on the “how to” of things. The answers to “why?” will come later, but at first the new Christian needs to learn how. Paul told the Thessalonians, “Finally, brothers, we instructed you how to live in order to please God, as in fact you are living. Now we ask you and urge you in the Lord Jesus to do this more and more” (1 Thess. 4:1).

The growing believer needs to learn how to have a time of morning prayer and Bible reading, how to memorize the Word of God, how to do Bible study, how to share the gospel in a simple and clear manner. These things will take time, but it is your responsibility to teach them to him.

All of this presupposes that you are doing these things yourself. When Waldron Scott started me on Scripture memory, he told me, “Here’s something that has been a great help to me.” And he gave me a small packet of verses, the Beginning with Christ pack.

What if he had said, “Here’s something that will probably be of some help to you. Personally, I have never done it myself? How would that have impressed me? Not too well.

Being an example is one of the best ways to teach another person. Paul stated, “Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you” (Phil. 4:9).

Don Rosenberger was an admiral’s writer at Pearl Harbor during World War II. Kenny Watters was a Christian who worked in the same office with Don. After Kenny had led Don to Christ, Don noticed that Kenny came to the office a half hour early, took his Bible out of his desk, and read it before beginning his day’s work.

Don assumed that this was what Christians did, so he started coming in half an hour early and reading his Bible. Then Don noticed that after work Kenny would go out on a hillside, lie down, and pray. So Don began going to the other side of the hill, lying down, and praying as well.

One evening Kenny took him into the mess hall and showed him some charts on the wall. (The chaplain had allowed Kenny to use the mess hall for this purpose.) There were men’s names on these charts with Xs and numbers on the lines between the names. Kenny explained that these represented the progress each Christian sailor had made in his Bible study and Scripture memory. He then asked if Don wanted his name on the wall with the others.

“You bet!” Don replied.

When Don saw what these other men were doing, he wanted to do it too. He was motivated by their example and what they were doing, for he knew that these things could be done by others as well. They showed him how to get started, and he was off and running to become the Christian leader he later became.

LeRoy Eims and Robert E. Coleman, The Lost Art of Disciple Making (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009).